01. September 2009

At the KMW factory in Munich the first Boxer was officially presented to both Ministers of Defence of the participating nations Germany and the Netherlands.

Dr. Franz-Josef Jung, the German Minister of Defence, thanked industry for the development of the high-tech armoured vehicle and announced that the vehicle will be deployed late spring 2011 to Afghanistan. The Boxer is a vehicle which offers currently the highest protection against mines and IED’s. First the vehicle will undergo its last tests under extreme cold conditions in Norway and extreme hot conditions in Australia.

The Netherlands will receive their first vehicle in March 2010. The Netherlands Minister of Defence, Eimert van Middelkoop, praised the intense German-Netherlands cooperation between the different industrial partners. The ARTEC consortium has Krauss-Maffei-Wegman (KMW) and Rheinmetall Landsysteme (RLS) as main contributors on the German side and, Rheinmetall Netherlands (former STORK PWV) on the Dutch side.

OCCAR-EA director, Patrick Bellouard, emphasized that the Boxer programme shows that cooperative programmes can be efficient and effective. He called out to all to be proud of the BOXER programme and the achievement that it represents and he paid special tribute not only to the managers, engineers and designers, but also to the technicians and shop floor workers who have made substantial personal commitment and effort to producing an excellent European military product. As there is still a lot of work to be done before the Boxer project will be finalised, the director concluded: “Es gibt viel zu tun, packen wir’s an!”